In August 1995 Dr. Joseph Leo Haining of Madison, Mississippi, donated to MDAH a photograph album his maternal aunt, Mrs. Louise Hamel Leist (1902-1976), had given him. The album appears to have been hand-made of plaid fabric and paper grocery bags stitched together. It contains 129 black-and-white photographs of levee construction, boats, fields, and unidentified people in the Greenville, Mississippi, area ca. 1935-1947. Haining speculated that his Aunt Louise's husband, Robert Austin Leist (1899-1974), a World War I veteran who worked for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, had taken the photographs during the course of his work, and four of the photographs do have U.S. Army Corps of Engineers captions.

The album is reproduced here as Zoomify JPEG images. Click below to browse through the pages.